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IRP and TIME Collaborate on Indonesia’s Palm Oil Dilemma

“Everything the company does goes against my conscience. But the question remains, who should work from the inside to inform everyone? Who should be pushing that these things are right, these things are acceptable, and these things are not?” says Victor Terran, in this video by Jacob Templin for TIME and the International Reporting Project (IRP). Templin traveled to Indonesia as part of IRP’s Gatekeeper Editor program in May 2011.

Terran is a resident of a village west of Borneo in the Kalimatan province, where he works as a field supervisor for one of the largest palm oil companies in Indonesia. Although the industry has supplied his village with much-needed employment and economic development, he worries that the influx of jobs has come at the expense of the health of the forests, agriculture, and clean rivers that sustain his village. “It’s not just about the money,” he says. “Will they sincerely keep the regulations and be fair to our community?”

An Industry with a Checkered Past

Terran’s skepticism of the industry is justified – palm companies, such as Sinar Mas, have a nasty track record of “abusing local labor and pilfering forests” for what they call “liquid gold,” says Templin.

Greenpeace released a report, “How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet,” in 2010 that alleged that Sinar Mas cut down important wildlife preserves, illegally planted on peat lands, and that these actions resulted in the release of considerable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and loss of critical wildlife habitat.

As a result, the company lost major contracts with Unilever, Kraft, and Nestle. Sinar Mas CEO Franky Widjaya tells Templin that the company is taking definitive steps to prevent such instances from happening again, but that change will not happen overnight.

Akhir bin Man, a manager for another palm oil company, PT Kal, says he does not want to experience a public relations nightmare similar to Sinar Mas, so his company is seeking certification from the internationally recognized Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The RSPO certification requires PT Kal to conserve nearly half of its land, use safer pesticides, and negotiate profit-sharing agreements with villagers.

Global Benefits

“These are not only vast forest landscapes which are home to species such as orangutans, elephants, and rhinos, but they’re also some of the globally most important reservoirs of carbon,” Adam Tomasek, director of the WWF Heart of Borneo Initiative, tells Templin.

Due to the wide-scale implications of disrupting such a substantial carbon sink, Tomasek and his colleagues see the destruction of these habitats as not just a local problem: “Sustainably managing the forest and carbon stocks that they contain here in Indonesia is not only important locally, not only important regionally, but an extremely important critical in the global approach to dealing with climate change,” he says.

Resisting the Juggernaut

Recognizing the inherent value of their natural resources, some villages are fighting to keep palm companies off of their land. Pak Bastarian is the head of such a village: “In my opinion, [palm] plantations are only owned by certain groups of people, and they don’t necessarily bring prosperity,” he tells Templin.

Bastarian is a reformed environmentalist whose hesitance toward the palm industry is a by-product of his own experiences – in the 1990s he worked for years running a timber company that illegally cut down trees. “I don’t know how many trees I cut down…a countless number.” Now, he uses his elected power to preserve trees like the ones he once cut down.

However, keeping the companies out of his village is an uphill battle, Templin explains. Bastarian says he faces mounting pressure from governmental officials, who make threats, and many villagers, who would rather have the jobs. He tells Templin that he even received bribes from PT Kal (an accusation they deny).

Bastarian’s position may cost him though – with elections right around the corner, he said does not know how much longer he can keep the palm companies out.

“My worry is that if our forests are cleared, our children will not be able to see what protected wood looks like, or what protected animals look like,” he tells Templin. When the palm oil companies first came, he chose to wait and see how the other villages fared before allowing them to come in. “To this day,” he says, “I’ve never changed my mind.”

Technological advancements are not the panacea for the global food and fuel situation. While the Green Revolution propelled population growth and development over the last half of the previous century, the benefits have yielded diminishing returns as the environmental degradation spurred by irresponsible cultivation, corporate short-sightedness and opportunism, and unbridled consumption by a small proportion of developed societies has placed the world in an even more compromised position, as we seek to remediate our over-hasty estimation of the earth's ability to rebound. The issue of corporate involvement in the production of biofuels is a looming example of how de facto economic apartheid is threatening to derail efforts to prevent further deforestation and reign in the feedback loops contributing to climate change. How we respond as a community of developed nations and the maturity with which we can temper commericial interests with an eye to the long term good will be a key factor in how we either rise to the challenge or choke in our own dust.

GM crops, biofuels, and other green bandaids for our underlying consumption problem worse. As companies see the spectre of peak oil in a falling bottom line, they will scramble to find any alternative that will keep them solvent, at whatever the environmental cost in the long term. With a burgeoning plant of 7 billlion or more, we will have to go back to basics to solve our fuel and food scarcity problems. Going back to basics to solve the impending global crisis will require maturity, cooperation, and focused effort on an international scale. Biofuels seems like a green solution, but in fact, as we've seen with the jatropha plant, ethanol, and other sources of plant based fuel, the land and the resources this production consumes is almost worse in the long term than conventional fuels for the environment, particularly for water and soil. Without oversight to mitigate the corporate interests inevitably entangled with any initiative to use green technology as a strategy to boost crop yields and in the developing world, Such attempts are like trying to outrun a tsunami, or outmaneuver the wave of desertification in the wake of the slow-moving barge of climate change. Like a band-aid that we are stretching over an metastasizing tumor, companies play their green inititiaves as a way to lull the public into thinking the status quo will suffice—which it won't. Demand and consumption must be reduced, as we seek to find remedial strategies that will also meet our needs our inflated sense of needs. And in the developed world’s case, our inflated sense of necessity vs. amenity compromises the sustainability of the global food system. While Monsanto and ADM, IRPand other corporate interests portray the sense that their goods are ultimately good for the planet, they are perpetuating a type of apartheid system in which small farmers are beholden to outside interests that exert undue control over their struggling economies and support imbalanced development. Biofuels merely make the poor poorer and the environment even more degraded. While Monsanto and ADM, IRPand other corporate interests portray the sense that their goods are ultimately good for the planet, they are perpetuating a type of apartheid system in which small farmers are beholden to outside interests that exert undue control over their struggling economies and support imbalanced development. Biofuels merely make the poor poorer and the environment even more degraded.

Patrick

I hope Bastarian can get re-elected and garner some support to keep PT Kal out. Hopefully the villagers can find some other means to create jobs. Pressure should be applied from food industry to make sure their sources of Palm Oil are using sustainable practices.